Jennifer Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, has a nice post about dumplings, including this:
I once made 888 dumplings for a party, my personal record. . . . You might have crudites, warm cheese, stale hummus, left over at the end of the party. You will never have leftover dumplings — unless you burned them.
This reminds me how much I liked the dumplings a the Tsinghua student cafeterias. I think they were served at every meal but I associate them with breakfast, maybe because there was less choice at breakfast. Fresh and homemade and chewy and well-spiced and incredibly cheap (like all the cafeteria food). Maybe 6 for 25 cents. There was an optional vinegar-like sauce (speaking of fermented foods). There were two types (pork & ??) but I didn’t understand the Chinese names.
I tried to avoid them. They were too easy and familiar. But it takes a certain amount of stamina to eat strange food so if I was tired, I’d have dumplings.